


over someone's dead body

by Heather



Category: Ghostbusters (2016)
Genre: A small piece of light flirting, Gen, lolz
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-22
Updated: 2020-08-22
Packaged: 2021-03-06 21:00:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,490
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26045413
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Heather/pseuds/Heather
Summary: "You did not bring that dead man here all the way from New Jersey just to use him as a cupholder."
Comments: 5
Kudos: 32
Collections: CAILURE EXCHANGE 2020





	over someone's dead body

**Author's Note:**

> FOR #6
> 
> TY TO NIBNOBBLING FOR THE BETA. &YOU

The most important part of this job, Patty had learned, was learning when to stay the fuck away from things. Unlabeled food in the fridge was a big one, for reasons of safety just as much as etiquette; you could never tell if a styrofoam box of green stuff was Holtzmann forgetting food for three weeks running or Erin being unable to find a sample cup on a recent job. Anything that was lighting up, spinning, humming, or sparking- nope, nope, nope, get Kevin to move it if it was in the way, stay far away from it until Holtzmann got back if it wasn't.

Come to think of it, half the things that made this job hazardous came from Holtzmann just being Holtzmann in Patty's general direction.

It wasn't shocking, then, that the giant freaking box blocking the entryway to the firehouse had Holtzmann's goddamn name on it. It also had curls of steam rising off it, suggesting dry ice packing.

Patty had not signed up for this.

Wobbling on one foot, Patty tried to step over the box, when the label gave her pause. The return address was for some lab somewhere; not unusual for anyone's mail at the firehouse, now that Kevin's experience with possession was making half the known world send letters begging to study him. (Patty wasn't sure, but she thought one of those letters might secretly have been from Erin.) 

But what she had missed before was a yellow warning sticker that would've been much bigger and more obvious if this thing had gone through the damn post office instead of whatever shipping company the lab used. It read, in text not nearly bold enough for Patty's tastes, "Caution: Human remains."

Oh fuck no.

Patty dropped her leg back to the ground and hopped slightly backwards away from the box. "Sorry, sir or ma'am! No disrespect intended! Goddamn, Holtz." She pulled her phone out of her pocket and texted: _Holtzmann, you better come get your damn corpse off our doorstep before I call whoever sent it to come take it back._

Holtzmann appeared in the doorway almost immediately- judging by how happy and excited she looked, not at all because of Patty's threat. She knelt down and hugged the damn box. "Hello, baby!" Then she stepped back inside and wheeled out the largest luggage dolly Patty had ever seen.

"Where the hell did you get that?"

Holtzmann gave her the look of a co-conspirator that no one ever really wanted Holtz to give them, reason number one being that she usually only gave it to you when she was doing shit like this. "What La Guardia doesn't know won't hurt them. Help me get it on here."

Patty took an end and helped her lift. "This is macabre, even for you. What the hell do you even need a body for? You're a physicist!"

"And a mechanical engineer," Holtzmann said, like that credential made her anything like qualified to be fooling around with bodies.

Patty hoped it wasn't. If Holtzmann was about to make herself her own Buster the Test Dummy with real human technology, she could count Patty the fuck out. She was not cleaning that up.

Some of what she was thinking must have been evident on her face, because Holtzmann said, "Relax. I'm not gonna blow up a corpse for fun in the firehouse. That would be very wasteful and highly unsanitary." She paused, reconsidered, and admitted, "Fun, but wasteful and unsanitary."

Patty drew a breath in through her nose, held it, and let it out through her mouth. She did it very slowly and pointedly, so Holtzmann wouldn't miss that she was doing it.

"Let's get it in the deep freeze and get a look at Contestant Number One," Holtzmann said, beaming and wheeling the cart kind of like she intended to hop on it and spin.

Patty wanted to ask if Contestant Number One meant that she was going to find a Contestant Number Two on the doorstep tomorrow, but then the rest of what she said sank in. "When did we get a deep freeze?"

"I built one," Holtzmann said. "Obviously."

"Was it out of parts that you stole from an abandoned Costco?" Patty asked, shaking her head.

"Don't be ridiculous," she said. "It was an A&P in Jersey."

"You know there are perfectly good junkyards you can salvage from, right?"

"Junkyards are for junk. The good stuff is the stuff that was working right up until they stopped using it."

It was hard to fault Holtz for logic.

"Seriously, though, what's the body for?" Patty asked instead.

Holtzmann opened the door to their new deep freeze- RIP, the former locker room, though Patty guessed they were never going to use the communal shower anyway- and pushed the box towards a steel table she had set on the tile in the shower area, just above the big drain in the floor. Patty tried not to think about how ominous that felt.

"Promotional material," Holtzmann said as she started prying the box open. "It would be impossible not to take our research and expertise seriously if we have an actual corpse on the premises."

"Holtz."

"Business expansion. Corpse removal and storage. We voted on it last night. I'm sorry. We gave your vote to Kevin." 

"Holtz!"

"To put out for Halloween to scare small children."

The worst part was, out of all her smart-ass answers so far, that one sounded the most plausible.

Holtzmann pulled the corpse from the waterproof liner inside the box and started gracelessly heaving him onto the table. Patty cringed, but took his legs to help her. It felt a lot like handling two twenty pound logs of frozen ground beef. With feet on the ends.

Once he was situated on the table, Holtzmann pulled a can of Pepsi from her lab coat pocket and positioned it in his hand. "Convenient cupholder!"

Patty gave her as withering a look as she could manage. "You did not bring that dead man here all the way from New Jersey just to use him as a cupholder."

"I will have you know, Patricia, that from New Jersey to here would be a very short distance to travel with a corpse." Holtzmann tilted her head at him. "Do you think it'd be difficult to dress him in an outfit with a lot of pockets?"

Pattty shook her head. "Why would you do that to this poor dead man?"

Holtzmann shrugged. "Sometimes I need extra pockets."

"The longer you go without saying what you need a body for, the more you're making me worry that you're doing something so damn fucked up, you can't even look me in the eye and say."

"You say that now," said Holtzmann, "but when you see my one-man off-Broadway reboot of _Weekend at Bernie's_ , you'll rue the day."

Against her will, Patty laughed. Holtzmann beamed at her, as though that had been just what she was waiting for.

"All right, actually, it's because Abby and I have been working on a theory about the connection of ghosts to their former bodies, and we want to crack one to look for ectoplasmic residue."

Patty frowned. "How do you know you're going to find any in this guy?"

"Well, we don't, that's why we want to crack it, but remember that beautiful blue full torso vaporous apparition we apprehended by the East River last week?"

"Yeah...."

Holtzmann turned the corpse's head towards Patty so she could see his (now that she was looking for it, kind of familiar) face. "Ta-da!"

"Damn," Patty said. She gave the corpse a more apologetic look. "Sorry about that, sir. You _were_ jogging through other people, though."

Holtzmann turned his face back to facing the ceiling. "If the theory is correct and we can identify in cadavers any evidence that they'll turn to ghosts, we might be able to find predictive signs that could be treatable for a more peaceful and--" She jerked her head towards her equipment. "--less irradiated way to move on."

"Why wouldn't you just tell me that in the first damn place?" Patty asked.

Holtzmann gave her a small smile that seemed almost shy, which was damn weird coming from her. "Then you wouldn't have laughed."

Sometimes, Patty forgot that Holtzmann really didn't know how to have friends. That she was sort of like a poorly-socialized rescue animal a lot of the time, and tried to cover a lot of it by trying to be funny.

She also didn't really like mushy stuff most of the time, though, so Patty just shook her head with another laugh. "Girl, you are ten pounds of crazy in a dollhouse coin purse, I hope you know that."

Holtzmann grinned. "Yeah, but you love it."

Patty smiled at another human being over the dead body of another for the very first time in her life. "Yeah," she said. "I do."


End file.
